Here’s another item to put on the list of Everyday Stuff We Grew Up With That’s Now Consigned to the Dustbins of History: Polaroid photography.

I just read that the Polaroid company plans to stop making its “instant film” as soon as there’s enough stockpiled to carry it through the rest of this year. (The company already stopped making Polaroid cameras a while back.) There is some talk of licensing the technology to other manufacturers, in order to keep die-hard niche enthusiasts supplied, but for all intents and purposes, the photo technique preferred by grandmas everywhere in the 1970s and ’80s is dead.

Don’t worry, I’m not heartbroken by this development. I’ve got both of my grandmothers’ Polaroid 600s stashed in the Archives, and I think I may even have my dad’s beautiful old ’60s-vintage Land camera somewhere — as I recall, it looked something like this — but I haven’t actually shot any Polaroid photos in years. I was somewhat surprised to learn that the film was even still being made.

(Tangent: did you know you can still get 110 film? I saw some at Walgreen’s the other day… totally freaked me out.)

However, it does always give me pause to think about how much things have changed in such a relatively short period of time. Polaroids were very common only 20 years ago — my parents have several albums that contain nothing but Polaroid photos (the albums even have official Polaroid logos on the covers!), and, as I mentioned, both of my grandmas took lots of “instant photos” (which actually took a full minute to develop, if you’ve never seen the process) on the holidays. And I remember very clearly how Dad’s older Land camera worked: instead of the neat little square card spit out of a slot, like on the grandmas’ “modern” 600s, you’d have to remove a long strip of black plasticky material from of the back of the camera and peel it open to get at the photo. The photo was wet and smelled vinegary, and you couldn’t touch it until it dried or you’d end up with a big thumbprint-shaped smear in the image. I used to love watching the image gradually materialize, like a signal being sent from some distant planet.

I think that’s the sort of thing that I truly mourn as we plunge headlong into the digital age: the sensuality of the older analog technologies. It’s not that I necessarily miss rotary phones, record players, and cheap, clunky cameras themselves; rather, it’s all that went along with them, the smells, sounds, and physicality of them, and even the human behaviors that resulted from those obsolete technologies. MP3s and JPEGs don’t have an odor or a texture. The new digital tech is more convenient in many ways, but I can’t help but feel like we’re sacrificing something to get that convenience. As in Lord of the Rings, the magic is draining out of the world.

Or maybe I’m just getting old. I do know that this little video clip seems impossibly ancient to me now, even though I recall a time when it was on TV about every five minutes:

Is it just me, or was there a lot of subtext in that young lady’s request to have her picture taken? What kind of pictures has she really got in mind? You know, the great thing about Polaroids was that you didn’t have to take the film in for processing, so nobody else would have to know what you were taking pictures of…